Eliana Willis

A special purpose grand jury in Georgia that investigated Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election for nearly two years recommended bringing criminal charges against several people who ultimately were not charged, including US senator Lindsey Graham, former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as the influential conservative figure Cleta Mitchell.Those recommendations were revealed Friday when the special purpose grand jury’s final report was unsealed. A regular grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election last month. Those charged include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer.The special purpose grand jury recommended bringing charges against Graham, Perdue and Loefller “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election with efforts focused on Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia”.Graham, a key Trump ally in the senate, called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger after the election and inquired about tossing aside legally cast mail-in ballots. Perdue reportedly pushed Georgia governor Brian Kemp to call a special session of the Georgia legislature in order to overturn the election results. Loeffler initially said she would vote against certification of Biden’s win in the US Senate before reversing course after the January 6 riot and voting in favor of certification.Mitchell, who remains an influential figure on the right today, was on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find votes in his favor. The special purpose grand jury unanimously recommended indicting her under several Georgia statutes.The special purpose grand jury also recommended indicting Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Boris Epshteyn, who remains a top Trump aide.It also recommended charges against Burt Jones, who served as a fake elector and is now lieutenant governor of Georgia. A special prosecutor is handling an investigation of Jones after Willis was barred from investigating him after hosting a fundraiser for a political rival. More

Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.There is no obligation for a defendant to inform a judge about a hypothetical motion and so, in that sense, Trump’s filing was aimed more at giving notice to the judge who is deliberating on whether all the defendants in the case should be tried at the same time.A spokesperson for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 others, alleging that the former president violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in pursuing a multi-pronged effort to throw out the results of a fair election.For the moment, two of the defendants, the former Trump election litigation lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, are scheduled for trial on 23 October after they both sought a speedy trial. But it remains unclear whether everyone else will also go to trial on that date.The removal question has major and complicated implications: if Trump or Meadows manages to transfer to federal court, that could upend any trial in Fulton county superior court that had started or finished because of potential jurisdictional issues.Trump can wait until 30 days after his arraignment – or in this case, his arraignment waiver and not-guilty plea filed on 31 August – to decide whether to seek removal to federal court.The Trump legal team is almost certain to wait until the last moment to file, the people said, given Trump’s overarching legal strategy with all of his criminal cases is to delay, potentially even beyond the 2024 election for which he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. More

A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors.On Wednesday, the judge Scott McAfee held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants including ex-president Donald Trump, who have been charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants will take approximately four months.The prosecutor Nathan Wade also said that the trial will involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline does not account for jury selection.McAfee also denied the request of Kenneth Chesebro to sever his case from his co-defendant Sidney Powell and ordered the two defendants to stand trial on 23 October together.McAfee disagreed with requests from Chesebro and Powell – both attorneys who worked alongside the Trump campaign in 2020 – who wanted their cases to be handled separately from other defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell have also filed motions for a speedy trial.Chesebro’s attorney Scott Grubman argued that while Chesebro’s case surrounds the fake electors scheme, Powell’s case revolves primarily around Coffee county’s voting systems breach.“You’re going to have two cases in one. You’re going to have days, if not weeks, God forbid months, of testimony just related to the Coffee county allegations,” Grubman argued.Manubir “Manny” Arora, another attorney of Chesebro’s, echoed similar sentiments, saying that Powell’s charges have “nothing to do with Mr Chesebro”.Meanwhile, state prosecutor Wade argued that even if Chesebro and Powell’s cases were severed, the Fulton county district attorney’s office would “absolutely” still require the same amount of time and witnesses to try the case.Nevertheless, McAfee disagreed, saying: “Based on what’s been presented today, I am not finding the severance from Mr Chesbro or Ms Powell is necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence for either defendant in this case.”McAfee, who decided to adhere to Chesebro and Powell’s request for a speedy trial, has yet to issue a final ruling on whether the remaining 17 co-defendants will also be tried in October.“It sounds like the state is still sticking to the position that all these defendants should remain and they want to address some of these removal issues,” McAfee said on Wednesday. “I’m willing to hear that. I remain very skeptical, but we can – I’m willing to hear what you have to say on it,” he added.McAfee gave prosecutors until Tuesday to submit a brief on whether the 23 October trial will include only Chesebro and Powell or all of the defendants. More

From 1h agoThe judge presiding over E Jean Carroll’s second civil defamation case against Donald Trump said a forthcoming trial will only determine the damages she is to receive from the former president, in a major victory for the writer.Politico obtained a copy of the judgment:Earlier this year, Carroll prevailed in her first lawsuit against Trump when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing her, and ordered him to pay $5m in damages. According to Reuters, the second suit Carroll filed accused Trump of defaming her by denying in 2019 that he had raped her in the mid-1990s.Because of the jury’s finding earlier this year, New York-based federal judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump made his 2019 statements with “actual malice”, and a jury will only need to decide how much in damages he should pay.Last month, the same judge dismissed a counterclaim filed by Trump against Carroll, an advice columnist.Opening arguments are starting today in the trial of a former White House aide to Donald Trump who is accused of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the January 6 committee, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Federal prosecutors are expected to present the case on Wednesday that former Trump White House official Peter Navarro should be convicted of contempt of Congress because he wilfully ignored a subpoena issued last year by the House January 6 committee during the investigation into the Capitol attack.The only standard that prosecutors will have to reach is that Navarro’s failure to comply with the subpoena was deliberate and intentional – and Navarro will not be able to argue in defense that he blew off the subpoena because he thought Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege.Navarro is about to face his contempt of Congress trial without what he had hoped would be his strongest defense, after the presiding US district court judge Amit Mehta ruled last week Navarro had failed to prove Trump had actually asserted executive privilege to block his cooperation.In an added twist, prosecutors also said the day before trial that they intend to argue that Navarro’s claim of executive privilege was actually self-incriminating because it reinforced his failure to comply with the subpoena was calculated and deliberate, according to court documents.That sets the stage for a trial in federal court in Washington which could end in a quick defeat for Navarro given his lack of defenses, though the consequential nature of the case could also mean it immediately becomes tied up for months on appeal.E Jean Carroll’s defamation suit is not the only instance where Donald Trump’s words are getting him into trouble. As the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, attorneys for special counsel Jack Smith are complaining about the former president’s constant public comments as the federal case against him for trying to overturn his election loss moves forward:Donald Trump is making “daily extrajudicial statements that threaten to prejudice the jury pool” in the federal criminal case dealing with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, attorneys for special counsel Jack Smith said in a court filing.Trump has not hesitated to criticize the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case. He has called her “highly partisan” and “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” pointing to her comments sentencing one of the January 6 rioters. Trump has also attacked Smith, calling him “deranged” and someone with “unchecked and insane aggression”.Chutkan has warned Trump’s attorneys about his comments. She has also imposed a protective order in the case, limiting what documents and other materials can be made with the public.“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” she said to John Lauro, one of his lawyers, during a hearing in August. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”Here’s more from Reuters on E Jean Carroll’s latest lawsuit against Donald Trump, which seeks damages based on allegations that he raped her in the 1990s, then lied about it two decades later:A federal judge on Tuesday said E Jean Carroll, the New York writer who last month won a $5m jury verdict against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation, can pursue a related $10m defamation case against the former US president.US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled in favor of the former Elle magazine columnist, after Trump had argued that the defamation case must be dismissed because the jury had concluded he never raped her.Kaplan said he may explain his reasoning later.Through a spokeswoman, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba maintained that Carroll should not be allowed to change her legal theory supporting the defamation case “at the 11th hour” to conform to the jury verdict.Habba was in Miami, where Trump pleaded not guilty in a separate case to federal criminal charges that he mishandled classified files.Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to Judge Kaplan, said: “We look forward to moving ahead expeditiously on E Jean Carroll’s remaining claims.”Both of Carroll’s civil lawsuits arose from Trump’s denials that he had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.On 9 May, a Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $2m for battery and $3m for defamation over Trump’s October 2022 denial.The judge presiding over E Jean Carroll’s second civil defamation case against Donald Trump said a forthcoming trial will only determine the damages she is to receive from the former president, in a major victory for the writer.Politico obtained a copy of the judgment:Earlier this year, Carroll prevailed in her first lawsuit against Trump when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing her, and ordered him to pay $5m in damages. According to Reuters, the second suit Carroll filed accused Trump of defaming her by denying in 2019 that he had raped her in the mid-1990s.Because of the jury’s finding earlier this year, New York-based federal judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump made his 2019 statements with “actual malice”, and a jury will only need to decide how much in damages he should pay.Last month, the same judge dismissed a counterclaim filed by Trump against Carroll, an advice columnist.In an interview with the Associated Press, Kamala Harris broke the White House’s relative silence on the prosecutions of Donald Trump and others for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and said those responsible for the campaign should be held accountable.“Let the evidence, the facts, take it where it may,” the vice-president in an interview held during a trip to Indonesia, where she is attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.“I spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor,” said Harris, a former attorney general of California. “I believe that people should be held accountable under the law. And when they break the law, there should be accountability.”Biden and other top White House officials have generally stayed mum as prosecutors have indicted Trump for the Mar-a-Lago documents and his campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Two of the cases Trump is facing were brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, whom Biden nominated for the job.People typically hire lawyers to give them advice on how to handle legal matters. But as ABC News’s report this morning on Evan Corcoran’s recollections of his time representing Donald Trump shows, the former president was not immediately interested in his advice on handling a grand jury subpoena to return whatever classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago:
Corcoran and another Trump attorney, Jennifer Little, flew to Florida to meet with Trump. “The next step was to speak with the former president about complying with that subpoena,” Corcoran recalled in a voice memo the next day.
But while sitting together in Trump’s office, in front of a Norman Rockwell-style painting depicting Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Trump playing poker, Trump, according to Corcoran’s notes, wanted to discuss something else first: how he was being unfairly targeted.
As Corcoran later recalled in his recordings, Trump continuously wandered off to topics unrelated to the subpoena — Hillary Clinton, “the great things” he’s done for the country, and his big lead in the polls in the run-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary race that Trump would officially join in November. But Corcoran and Little “kept returning to the boxes,” according to the transcripts.
Corcoran wanted Trump to understand “we were there to discuss responding to the subpoena,” Corcoran said in the memos.
…
As Corcoran described it in his recordings, he explained to Trump during that meeting what the former president was facing. “We’ve got a grand jury subpoena and the alternative is if you don’t comply with the grand jury subpoena you could be held in contempt,” Corcoran recalled telling Trump.
Trump responded with a line included in the indictment against him, asking, “what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?”
The transcripts reviewed by ABC News reveal what Corcoran says he then told Trump. “Well, there’s a prospect that they could go to a judge and get a search warrant, and that they could arrive here,” Corcoran recalled warning the former president as they sat at Mar-a-Lago.
According to CNN, investigators from special counsel Jack Smith’s office are asking witnesses about fundraising done by Donald Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell, and whether it was used to fund efforts to breach voting systems in four swing states:
According to sources, witnesses interviewed by Smith’s prosecutors in recent weeks were asked about Powell’s role in the hunt for evidence of voter fraud after the 2020 election, including how her nonprofit group, Defending the Republic, provided money to fund those efforts.
Powell promoted Defending the Republic as a non-profit focused on funding post-election legal challenges by Trump’s team as it disputed results in key states Biden had won. Those challenges and fundraising efforts underpinning them were all based on the premise that evidence of widespread voter fraud was already in hand.
But according to documents reviewed by CNN and witness testimony obtained by the House select committee that investigated January, 6, 2021, the group was used to fund a desperate search to retroactively back-up baseless claims that Trump’s lawyers had already put forward in failed lawsuits challenging the results in several states.
A series of invoices and communications obtained by election integrity groups including The Coalition for Good Governance and American Oversight show Defending the Republic contributed millions of dollars toward the push to access voting equipment in key states.
In a court filing after her indictment in Georgia, Powell denied involvement in the Coffee County breach but acknowledged that “a non-profit she founded” paid the forensics firm hired to examine voting systems there.
Powell did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Smith’s investigators have also dived deep into the bewildering conspiracy theories that Trump allies pedaled following his election loss to try to convince his supporters that the polls were rigged:
Smith’s team has specifically asked witnesses about certain conspiracy theories pushed by Powell including that Dominion Voting Systems had ties to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and featured software he used to rig his own election. The software company, Smartmatic, has previously said the turnout in those Venezuelan elections, not the voting system, was manipulated.
Both Dominion and Smartmatic have said that they are competitors with no corporate links, knocking down the claim pushed by Powell.
One witness who met with Smith’s team earlier last month, former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, spoke at length about how Trump allies accessed voting systems in Antrim County, Michigan, shortly after Election Day. Kerik also discussed the origins of a theory that voting machines could switch votes from one candidate to another, according to his lawyer Tim Parlatore.
Kerik also acknowledged the breach of voting systems in Coffee County during his interview with federal prosecutors, Parlatore told CNN, adding that while his client raised the topic, the conversation did not delve into specifics.
Kerik and another witness who met with Smith’s team in recent weeks were both asked if Powell was ever able to back-up her various claims of fraud, including conspiracy theories that foreign countries had hacked voting equipment.
Both were also asked about Defending the Republic and how it was used as a source of funding efforts to find evidence of voter fraud, sources told CNN.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. New reports have emerged in recent days that offer more details of the legal peril that Donald Trump has found himself in. Weeks after he indicted Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, CNN reports that special counsel Jack Smith is continuing his investigation, focusing in particular on attorney Sidney Powell’s activities in Georgia. Powell was last month among the 19 people – Trump included – who were charged by Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis in a racketeering indictment over the campaign to block Joe Biden from winning the state’s electoral votes.Separately, ABC News reports this morning that another attorney for Trump, Evan Corcoran, specifically warned the president that if he did not comply with the government’s efforts to retrieve classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, the FBI could search the property. But then another attorney for the former president warned Corcoran that if he continued to press him, Trump is “going to go ballistic”. In June of this year, Smith indicted Trump and his aides on charges related to the documents hidden at the resort.Here’s what’s happening today:
Officials from border security agencies will appear before a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee to testify about the touchy subject of asylum law at 2.30pm eastern time.
Secretary of state Antony Blinken snuck away to Kyiv for a surprise visit. Follow our live blog for all the latest news from Ukraine.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefs reporters at 1pm. More

Donald Trump should “absolutely” be held accountable for inspiring the January 6 attack on Congress, said Kamala Harris, speaking after a former leader of a far-right group involved in the riot was sentenced to 22 years in jail.“I spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor,” the vice-president told the Associated Press. “I believe people should be held accountable under the law. And when they break the law, there should be accountability. And I support it when it happens.”Asked, “Does that extend to the former president?”, Harris said: “Well, everyone has their right to their day in court. But absolutely, people should be held accountable under our system of law, right? Let the evidence and facts take it where it may.”More than 1,100 people have been arrested over the deadly attack of 6 January 2021, which happened after Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, according to his lie the result of electoral fraud. Hundreds have been convicted and sentenced.In Washington on Tuesday, Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, was given the longest sentence yet. Others convicted of seditious conspiracy have been given terms ranging from 10 to 18 years.Trump faces four federal criminal charges related to election subversion. He also faces 13 charges related to election subversion in Georgia; 40 related to his retention of classified information; and 34 regarding hush-money payments in the 2016 election.He denies wrongdoing and claims political persecution, including in civil cases regarding his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from an allegation of rape. In the Republican presidential race, he leads national and key state polls by wide margins and seems set to face Biden again. Trials are set for primary season but convictions would not stop Trump running.Harris spoke to the AP in Jakarta, Indonesia, during a regional summit. She said: “Democracies are very fragile. They will only be as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”She dismissed concerns that Biden is too old. In 2021, at 78, the former senator and vice-president was the oldest president ever inaugurated. If re-elected he will be 82 when his second term starts and 86 when it ends.Polling shows more than three-quarters of Americans believe Biden is too old, a concern less strongly expressed regarding Trump, who is 77.Harris said: “I see [Biden] every day. A substantial amount of time we spend together is in the Oval Office, where I see how his ability to understand issues and weave through complex issues in a way no one else can to make smart and important decisions on behalf of the American people have played out.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“And so I will say to you that I think the American people ultimately want to know that their president delivers. And Joe Biden delivers.”In a new book, the journalist Franklin Foer not only describes aides’ concerns about Biden’s age but also Harris’s struggles in a role John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, famously said was “not worth a pitcher of warm piss”.Harris is the subject of Republican attacks, focused on the possibility of her succeeding Biden. Asked about her readiness to be president, Harris told the AP: “Joe Biden is going to be fine, so that is not going to come to fruition.“But let us also understand that every vice-president … understands that when they take the oath they must be very clear about the responsibility they may have to take over the job of being president.” More

Federal prosecutors are expected to present the case on Wednesday that former Trump White House official Peter Navarro should be convicted of contempt of Congress because he wilfully ignored a subpoena issued last year by the House January 6 committee during the investigation into the Capitol attack.The only standard that prosecutors will have to reach is that Navarro’s failure to comply with the subpoena was deliberate and intentional – and Navarro will not be able to argue in defense that he blew off the subpoena because he thought Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege.Navarro is about to face his contempt of Congress trial without what he had hoped would be his strongest defense, after the presiding US district court judge Amit Mehta ruled last week Navarro had failed to prove Trump had actually asserted executive privilege to block his cooperation.In an added twist, prosecutors also said the day before trial that they intend to argue that Navarro’s claim of executive privilege was actually self-incriminating because it reinforced his failure to comply with the subpoena was calculated and deliberate, according to court documents.That sets the stage for a trial in federal court in Washington which could end in a quick defeat for Navarro given his lack of defenses, though the consequential nature of the case could also mean it immediately becomes tied up for months on appeal.Navarro was indicted last June on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress after he was referred to the justice department for prosecution for defying the January 6 committee’s subpoena demanding documents and testimony about the former president’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.The former Trump adviser has long insisted he could not comply with the subpoena because Trump had asserted executive privilege and he was obliged to protect his confidential discussions with Trump when he was the president.But Navarro has faced a reckoning in the months since, unable to produce any direct evidence from Trump or Trump’s lawyers supporting his claims, and the judge found in recent hearings that even Navarro’s most compelling pieces of evidence lacked substance.The lack of actual evidence for the executive privilege assertion – even though Navarro swore to it under oath – was cited repeatedly by the judge when he ultimately decided that Navarro could not raise the executive privilege issue at all as a defense at trial.“There was no formal invocation of executive privilege by [Trump] after personal consideration nor authorization to Mr Navarro to invoke privilege on his behalf,” Mehta said, adding Navarro had not met his burden to show a valid assertion.The standard for a valid executive privilege assertion is three-fold, Mehta ultimately ruled: it must be made by the president or an authorized representative, it must be made after personal consideration, and it must be specific to the subpoena in question.One letter addressed to Navarro after his indictment from the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran saying Navarro had an obligation to protect executive privilege was unsatisfactory because it notably did not say Navarro was authorized to invoke on Trump’s behalf, the judge found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd a second letter addressed to Navarro informing him that Trump had asserted executive privilege over a different subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Trump administration’s Covid response was not applicable to the January 6 committee subpoena, the judge found.Still, even if Navarro had been able to prove a privilege assertion, it was unclear whether he would have been in a different position. Mehta noted, for instance, that Navarro would have still needed to testify about non-privileged topics and produce a log of documents he was withholding.Last February, Navarro was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee after he played an outsized role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and was briefed on a plan to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep”.After he skipped his deposition, the committee moved to hold him in contempt before the full House of Representatives voted to refer him to the justice department for criminal prosecution.Navarro became the second person indicted for his subpoena defiance after former Trump strategist Steve Bannon also ignored his January 6 committee subpoena. Bannon was convicted last year and sentenced to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines, but remains free pending appeal. More

The former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison on Tuesday for his part in the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 election. Tarrio’s attorney, Nayib Hassan, said his team had been ‘taken a bit off guard’ with the sentence and they would file an appeal.

The judge handed down the longest sentence yet in a case relating to the January 6 Capitol attack. Tarrio was a top target in one of the most important cases prosecuted by the US justice department More

The former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison on Tuesday for his part in the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 election.Prosecutors sought a 33-year term. The judge did not agree but nonetheless handed down the longest sentence yet in a case relating to 2020 and the January 6 Capitol attack. The longest sentence previously handed down was 18 years, to both Ethan Nordean, a member of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia.Tarrio was a top target in one of the most important cases prosecuted by the US justice department over the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.In May, Tarrio and three lieutenants were convicted of charges including seditious conspiracy, a civil-war-era offense previously rarely brought but now levied against members of far-right groups that took part in the January 6 attack.In remarks to the court in Washington, Tarrio said he was sorry for the events of January 6, and credited police officers for their bravery in resisting the attack.“What happened on January 6 was a national embarrassment,” Tarrio said, adding that he both now knew Trump lost to Joe Biden and blamed himself for actions that led to him losing his freedom.Becoming emotional, Tarrio said: “I do not think what happened that day was acceptable.”He pleaded with the judge, Timothy Kelly, for leniency. “Please show me mercy,” Tarrio said. “I ask you that you not take my 40s from me.”Kelly emphasised the damage done.“That day broke our previously unbroken tradition of peacefully transferring power,” he said. “That previously unbroken tradition is broken now, and it’s going to take time and effort to fix it.”Before handing down the sentence, the judge said he did not see any indication that Tarrio was remorseful for what he was convicted of, adding that there was a strong need to send a signal to others.“It can’t happen again,” Kelly said.The case was one of the most significant prosecutions in the federal investigation of the attack on Congress, which saw supporters of Trump shock the world with their attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.The Proud Boys are a so-called “western chauvinist” group, often involved in street fighting with leftwing activists. Tarrio was involved in the run-up to the January 6 insurrection but did not take part in the violence. Before members of the Proud Boys joined thousands in storming the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify Biden’s victory, Tarrio was arrested and ordered to leave Washington. But prosecutors showed he organised and led from afar.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Using his powerful platform, Tarrio has repeatedly and publicly indicated that he has no regrets about what he helped make happen on January 6,” prosecutors said.Tarrio’s lawyers denied the Proud Boys had any plan to attack the Capitol, arguing that prosecutors used Tarrio as a scapegoat for Trump, who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House on January 6, urging supporters to “fight like hell”.The justice department has charged Trump with conspiring to subvert American democracy. But the Tarrio case and hundreds of others stand as vivid reminders of the chaos fueled by Trump’s lies, including the storming of the Capitol in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, a riot now linked to nine deaths including suicides among law enforcement.Urging a lenient sentence, Tarrio’s lawyers noted that he has a history of cooperating with law enforcement. Court records uncovered in 2021 showed that Tarrio worked undercover and cooperated with investigators after he was accused of fraud in 2012.During the riot, however, Tarrio posted encouraging messages on social media, expressing pride and urging followers to stay at the Capitol. He posted a picture of rioters in the Senate chamber with the caption “1776”, the year of the Declaration of Independence.Several days before the riot, a girlfriend sent Tarrio a document entitled “1776 Returns”. It called for storming and occupying government buildings, “for the purpose of getting the government to overturn the election results”, prosecutors said.More than 1,100 people have been charged in relation to the Capitol attack. More than 600 have been sentenced, more than half receiving prison terms.The Associated Press contributed to this report More